VOICES FROM THE WILDERNESS...... HOW LONG WILL THE WINTER LAST?

We should join in celebrating the power of peaceful protest that was demonstrated earlier this month in North Dakota. After months of effort, the Army Corps of Engineers announced that they would not issue a permit to the pipeline company to construct an oil pipeline on significant tribal lands and under a pure water lake - Lake Oahe - that is a water supply source and houses sacred Sioux sites. This victory of people over corporate greed should be a source of pride and encourage all of us to know that taking a stand is more than worth the effort. It is notable that this victory comes at the very same time that 2000-3000 veterans chose to join the protest to protect those who had peaceably assembled to protest the construction of the pipeline under the lake. They faced "militarized" local law enforcement attempting to "encourage" the protesters to abandon their camp through the use of water cannon, flash-bang grenades, spotlights, and constant flyovers - day and night - to harass the protesters. The threat of forcible removal after the December 5th deadline to evacuate, evaporated on December 4th with the Army Corps announcement. March on......

Yet, the proponents of the pipeline, including the incoming President, have said that the pipeline will be built.  Will a President Trump simply order the Army Corps of Engineers to reverse their decision to deny the necessary permits for the project to proceed to violate the pristine waters that the Native Americans had protected?  Or, will the Army Corp prevail and develop an alternative route for the pipeline?  Only time will tell.  Meanwhile, the pipeline issue remains frozen in time - just like the freezing temperatures in North Dakota that were endured by the members of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe protesters and the thousands of military vets who stood with them in the days before the Army Corps announcement.

Other protests across the nation took place in a variety of cities and towns, protesting the election of Donald Trump.  Large in some city venues and smaller in other towns and villages, most were peaceful protest marches that appeared more like funeral processions than street activism.  Nonetheless, the point was made that a good segment of the electorate was concerned regarding the outcome of the 2016 election and felt the need to communicate that to a broader audience.  After all, the President-elect had said so many hateful things and taken a variety of positions with which a majority of Americans disagree, that demonstrations were predictable.  And, after all of the focus and commentary regarding women's issues, including considerable misogyny by Trump, and the now-famous Trump Tapes with Billy Bush, it should be no surprise that planning for a "Woman's March on Washington" began in earnest in the days after the election.  Feeling at risk and abused by Trump's testosterone-fueled attitude toward women, many wanted to take a stand rather than quietly roll over and accept the notion that decades of progress might be lost overnight with the Trump ascendancy.  In fact, this writer has joined in the fray as well.  As a member of the NJ Legislature in the late 70s, I was a co-sponsor of the state version of the Woman's ERA and a supporter of the ERA constitutional amendment.  The ERA passed in NJ but failed to garner the support of enough states across the nation to become a part of the US Constitution. The March will take place on January 21st - one day after the Donald is sworn in as the 45th President of the United States. 500,000 women and their supporters are expected to descend on the nation's capital on that day, not to protest the Trump election, but to stand for equality and women's rights.

So far, the National Park Service and the Trump Transition Team has yet to release a permit for a public site in DC for this demonstration of women's solidarity.  You can bet, however, that the march will happen.  What is unclear is how the Trump crowd will respond.  Will they really try to deny the women the "right peaceably to assemble"?  Are water cannon in our future as they were for the the Standing Rock Sioux tribe protesters?  Are there enough police vans to arrest thousands of women on that day? Or, will the permits be issued, hundreds of thousands of women arrive and assemble for their march and peaceful demonstration, raise their issues, make their point, and return home to their families and children on a cold January day?  We will know the answer to these question in a few weeks.  And, just maybe, how this event is handled will foretell much about the new Trump administration... 

DEMOCRATIC "DRIFT", THE "BASKET OF DEPLORABLES" AND THE "DUMB VOTE."

Many of us are still in shock and cannot understand how Donald Trump, with all of his failings - from business bankruptcies to misogynist "p%**Y- grabbing" statements to wall building and his insults regarding Latinos, Mexicans, Muslims, and others - could win the presidency WHILE losing the popular vote by 2.9 million votes.  We wonder... how could all of those folks, including many former Democrats, union members, blue collar folks, women, and minorities, cast enough of their votes for Trump in historically blue states (carried by Obama twice), that Hillary lost this historic opportunity to become the first US woman president?  Why did these voters cast their votes against their own interests and help to elect someone who is plainly supporting policies and positions that they oppose?  Now, I am not a pollster - but, then again, they were all wrong.  I am not a pundit - but, they were all wrong too. I am a Progressive Democrat and I am rightly and mightily concerned that in about one month Donald Trump will take the oath and become president of the United States!  Along with his cabinet appointments, he is moving toward the day of reckoning and I felt sort of like a resident of Tatooine in Star Wars watching the skies as the Death Star, the Imperial Emperor, and Darth Vader slowly approach for the final showdown with the resistance.  "How did we get here?" seems to be the question.  So, let me add my view on this question, right or wrong.

1.  THE DEMOCRATIC DRIFT.  Early on in the primary season, I had the uncomfortable feeling that somehow, we as Democrats just were not connecting with our brethren in the mid-west.  With the Sanders campaign in full battle mode, they scored with working families - especially in the mid-west states of Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania - on issues related to job loss and economic opportunity.  Senator Sanders placed the blame on NAFTA and other free-trade proposals, notable the Trans Pacific Partnership that President Obama was pressing hard for at that time and Secretary Clinton had described as the "gold standard of trade agreements."   Although Hillary had reversed field on the TPP, most skeptical voters assumed that candidates say whatever is necessary to win and that she simply felt some heat from the left and flip-flopped on the issue.  Meanwhile, the Trump camp specifically and the Republican Party generally, who had all along expected to run against Clinton, was spending months attempting to embed in the minds of the voters that Hillary was not "trustworthy."

In the end, many blue-collar workers, especially in the mid-west, felt that they had been abandoned by the Democratic party - and by Hillary Clinton in particular.  After all, Democrats had "sold them out" with "bad trade deals." They came to believe that Bill Clinton did it with his support of NAFTA. And, Barak Obama was now doing the same thing with TPP.  In spite of Hillary's protestations that she opposed TPP (after she supported it), she was "sandwiched" between her husband and her President on the issue, and that was that.  The laid-off factory workers and those who lost their jobs to off-shore operations as companies moved their factories to low-labor-cost locations south of the border, and corporations moved their cash off-shore to foreign tax havens, saw this as Hillary fudging the truth.  In any case, working families felt abused, abandoned, and sacrificed to the profit motivations of large companies, millionaire CEOs, and the corporate elite. Even worse, they concluded that the political class - the DC elite - K Street lobbyists and the Beltway denizens - was not a part of the solution, but that they had also sold out to corporate interests, and were a part of the problem - Democrats included. The "Democratic Drift" was becoming a deluge. 

After all, didn't Hillary just get paid $500,000 for a speech to Goldman Sachs?  Isn't Bill Clinton and the Clinton Foundation taking millions of dollars in donations from US corporations and foreign interests and governments too?  Doesn't that mean that they are also in the pockets of the wealthy business interests? So...  who does Hillary listen too?  No wonder the banks got bailed out when the recession hit....  and, the rest of us lost homes to foreclosure...  No wonder that the stock market DOUBLED AND MORE over the last 8 years and the pay of CEOs went through the roof while pay for working folks is falling further and further behind. And, what about Whitewater??? And, Benghazi???  And, who killed Vince Foster anyway??? Do you realty think that Hillary now sees the mistakes she made and the painful job losses resulting from these international trade deals that benefit wealthy corporations or is she just saying that now so she gets to be elected?  And, after all, after all of these investigations over years, with all that smoke there must be some fire too, right?

The goal of this insidious and continuous right-wing strategy to discredit the Clintons and drive mistrust of Hillary worked.  Poll after poll showed that most voters felt that Hillary was competent and experienced but, not trustworthy enough to be president. So, if both Democrats and Republicans are in the deep pockets of millionaires, billionaires, and big corporate interests including Wall Street, then who can save us?  Who can we trust to feel our pain and to carry our banner?  Perhaps it is someone who isn't part of the political class, not from inside the beltway, not a part of the merry-go-round of pay-to-play politics that has poisoned our democracy.  The conclusion was that an outsider was needed - someone who didn't take big donations, was not "politically correct", would speak the truth, and would clearly take up our cause for a better future with more economic opportunity, better health care options, and more security in the future.  And, that person.... was and is Donald J. Trump. Nativism, misogyny, and isolationism, aside, Trump seemed up front and strong.  Naming Mexicans and Muslims as the problem provided the scapegoats necessary, and the seemingly-stalled Obama Administration (blocked at every turn by Republicans in the House and Senate), looked ineffective at addressing these issues and a boatload of other challenges. President Obama, as he continued to campaign for the TPP well into the Primary Election season, seemed out of touch with working folks. Trump, on the other hand, promised to sink the trade deals proposed, re-negotiate NAFTA, stop the flow of illegals into the US, and prevent the entry of "dangerous" Muslims into our country.  Expanding job opportunity, bringing back corporate profits from their off-shore locations, and preventing American jobs from leaving the country was the snake oil that was needed to ignite a large number of voters who had tuned out over the years and to bring along some Democratic voters who felt abandoned and set a drift by their own party.  Both groups "drifted" over to Trump in sufficient numbers in the industrial mid-west to turn the tide in Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania to name a few, and that gave Trump the Electoral votes necessary to win the Presidency.

2. "DEPLORABLES AND THE DUMB VOTE"  As I watched Hillary speak at a LBGT fund-raising event in New York, I winced when she delivered the line describing Trump supporters as being a "basket of deplorables." The line got a rousing round of applause and was much the topic discussion and blow-back from the Trump campaign and a broad number of commentators in the days that followed.  I am sure that the comment was meant to describe racists, misogynists, Islamophobic and homophobic folks as "deplorable", and not apply it to every person who felt that Trump was the answer.  In my opinion, those beliefs - and the people who espouse them are, in fact, deplorable - especially in a democratic system where all are "created equal" and freedom of religion is embedded in our founding document, the US Constitution. Still, the comment was made and those Trump supporters who believed that Hillary had insulted them as throw-away Americans, took offense at this apparent insult.  Shirts reading, "I am not deplorable", or just "DEPLORABLE" appeared and underscored the sting of the comment that Hillary made at that event.  She paid dearly for that statement on election day, having inflamed Trump supporters with this perceived insult.

Throughout the campaign, and especially in connection with the ever-present incremental polling reports, a distinction was constantly made between "college educated voters" and those "without a degree."  It seemed that the level of education variable had a distinct data impact on who the voter was attracted to as a candidate. It looked as though the "college educated" leaned to Clinton and those "without a college education" toward Trump.  The dialogue was quickly transformed into short-hand comments that sounded like a distinction between the "smart vote" and the "dumb vote" or, in the alternative, the "educated vote" and the "uneducated vote."  No matter how you slice it, these descriptions mutated into yet another insult leveled at Trump voters by the "lyin' media" and the "DC elites in the beltway" supported by those wealthy Wall Street folks and the liberal coastals in NY and LA. It was the rest of the country - the great middle and working folks - who felt abandoned, lied to, and abused by that crowd who now called them "dumb", "stupid", and "uneducated" for finding themselves in economic distress. More of the same just was not an attraction for these "dumb" voters. The alternative choice was someone who was one of them and who publicly defended them in rally after rally - Donald Trump. In fact, at one rally, Trump even announced that he "loved uneducated voters" after  an earlier polling report showed that he was narrowing the gap between he and Hillary in one state. As the rage of these "deplorable, dumb, and uneducated" voters seethed with insult after insult heaped upon them by people, pollsters, politicians, and Democrats who they had supported for decades, their anger grew as did their commitment to Trump.  Their frustration and anger would be evident on election day - revenge would be theirs on November 8th.  After all, their hero - Trump - would never actually DO any of those outlandish things that he said during rallies...... right?

The truth is that the system - Democrats and Republicans alike - had failed working families over the last 20 years.  From the mid-90s through 2016, too much money in politics - in fact, an obscene amount of money, including "dark money" - that has polluted our political system; too much abuse of redistricting of congressional districts making our "representative democracy" less than representative and more of a manipulation; too much gridlock and too little responsiveness in the Beltway; and too much disconnect from every-day real people and the problems that they face every day has sewn the seeds of suspicion and distrust in our governmental institutions and those who lead them.  The "deplorable, dumb, and uneducated" voters sought out - and found - an outside "disruptor" to "drain the swamp" and "blow up the system."  And, the person they chose was Donald Trump. Trump first beat the Republican establishment and then laid waste the Democratic establishment as well. The question remains, what will a President Trump do and how will he do it?  In a few weeks, the next chapter will begin.

In the days ahead, I will explore the Trump cabinet nominees and the seeds of the resistance being sown even now.  

 

WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE BOYS, WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE? A REPUBLICAN TRAIN WRECK?

In 1917, Howard Johnson and Percy Wenrich wrote a song entitled, "Where do we go from here?"  The ditty became a popular refrain - especially the chorus - "Oh joy, oh boy, where do we go from here? - during the First World War. The United States had entered the "War to End All Wars" as then-President Woodrow Wilson described the conflict, and American spirit was high.  After all, we had yet to experience the horrors of trench warfare on the Western Front.  Young men by the thousands volunteered to join the ranks of our troops, eager to score a quick victory for the Allied effort. As they marched, songs were sung like this one and the famous "Over There" (1918).

Though I am up in years, I am not old enough to have been one of those marching volunteers in WWI.  But, as a teacher of American History decades later, I came across these tunes and they stuck.  I had not thought about them for decades - until now.  And, given the surprise (at least for me) victory of Donald Trump in the race for the presidency, I thought it was an appropriate question to ask - "where do we go from here?"  Whether Democrats, Progressives, Republicans, Liberals, Environmentalists, Independents, think tanks, union members, business owners, corporate types, or Republicans.... the same question applies and begs for an answer - "where do we go from here boys?"

REPUBLICANS:  Traditional Republicans, fully captured by the Conservative Party 20 years ago and re-enforced by the Tea Party, find that their "deficit hawk" theme, has been abandoned by the Trump juggernaut along with balanced budgets, and their want to dismantle government "activism". With Speaker Ryan - again - talking about privatizing Social Security, transforming Medicare into a voucher program with medical savings accounts, and making medicaid a state block grant (all resurrected from a decade and more ago), it appears that the House is on a collision course with soon-to-be-President Trump.  The Donald stated over and over during the course of the campaign that he seeks an INCREASE in Social Security, an EXPANSION of Medicare and opposes any suggestion that cuts to these social programs would be in order.  And, while Trump supports the repeal of Obamacare, his clear message is that it needs to be replaced with a BIGGER AND BETTER plan that includes "everyone."  Ryan's announced plan is to repeal Obamacare, eliminate the expansion of Medicaid, and replace it with NOTHING.  In other words, remove health care access to millions of Americans that have it today due to Obamacare and the subsidies that support it.  The Ryan plan and the Trump plan are polar opposites heading for a Trump Train wreck.  One might ask Speaker Ryan whether or not he has boarded the Trump Train yet.  You will recall that his ticket was barely "punched." Ryan is attempting to ignore facts or simply does not understand that the primary and general election victory of Donald Trump has transformed the Republican Party into a more activist and populist party and not the conservative, deficit-hawk posture that they have advocated for years.  And, just maybe, that is why Ryan is delighted that Mike Pence is heading the Transition Team..... Perhaps we are witnessing the very first policy coup as President Trump's agenda is undermined from within by his "allies" on the Hill.  So, lets take a look at some other the Ryan agenda:

1. Cut Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and any other "entitlement" social programs. Save cash.
2. Opposes increased spending on infrastructure projects as "boondoggles" that add to the deficit.
3. Supports increased spending, however, for military "build-up." This, of course, is in spite of the
    fact  that the US military is larger than the next largest 13 national military forces ADDED
    TOGETHER.  One can only speculate that military spending has no impact on the deficit?
    (Trump supports this position, largely because he is not a deficit-sensitive person.) 
4. Repeal Obamacare and replace it with nothing or with some yet-to-be determined scaled back
    program of medical savings accounts, tax credits for buying your own health care policy, and more
    of, "you-are-on-your-own" thinking.

With the exception of the military build-up, Trump is on the opposite side of all of these.  

These are just a few "flash points" that could start the fireworks between the Republican Presidency and the Republican Congress - the Ryan wing of the Party and the new Trump Republican brand.  So far, Mike Pence has succeeded in salting the new administration with Ryan/Pence congressional allies in top administration positions - a sort of "infiltration" of the more expansive populist Trump philosophy with the deficit-hawk slash and burn attitude.  Both sides are gathering up speed.  But, instead of traveling in the same policy direction, they appear to be on a collision course.  What happens when the sparks fly and the crash happens is anyone's guess at this point.  We may very well find out who the real President is - Trump or Ryan.  But, if I were a betting man, my money would be on the Trumpster.  Stay tuned. 

By the way, have you noticed that Mitch McConnell has been silent as these obvious differences inflate as we near January 20th?  Maybe he doesn't want to be standing on the tracks when these two engines collide.